Ditching The Covert Narc.

Have you ended a friendship with a covert narcissist? What happened?

From Quora:

I realised after about 4 years of banging my head against a brick wall that I was actually sub-consciously trying to fix my relationship with my sibling. It hit me like a bolt from the blue and was enough to send me running.

The covert narc didn’t notice I’d backed away for a few weeks because it coincided with their lovebombing of other new recruits to the church of THEM.

Since then the narc has reached out to me on two other occasions. It’s been two years since I ditched them. That tells me that in 24 months of life, the narc has only found themselves short of admiration and attention on two brief occasions.

My absence was nothing more to them than a brief disruption before normal service resumed at the altar of their ego.

Why did I stick around so long? Because the narc gives just enough to keep you wanting more but never enough to make it count.

The narc will see any of your successes as a direct threat to their own, withholding all praise and discouraging others from doing so by picking holes hidden as fake concern. Only when they want to be perceived as a good person will they give any public praise and never to your face in any meaningful kind of way.

When they were making you like them, they doubtless praised others up also and that will be what makes you hang on in there wayyy longer than you should. They can be nice, you’ve seen it with your own eyes and if you just stuck it out, they may deign to dazzle you in their spotlight, just for long enough to earn your loyalty but never long enough to be genuine or benefit you in any way.

Oh, you’ll make excuses for them. They’ve had a hard life, they have a diagnosis, they don’t mean to be so unrelentingly self-focused.

You’ll get to the point where the pain is such that ending the friendship is a must and you’ll go in all determined to make that happen… which is when they suck you back in like an amphetamine addicted Dyson.

The narc will take, take and take some more until you reach the point where you have nothing left for them at which point you cease to be useful and off they fuck.

The covert narc will do all of this under the guise of being your friend.